Using an iPad to work with PDFs stored in EndNote

EndNote is a powerful bibliographic database helpful for humanities work. An iPad EndNote app is currently close to beta testing. I don't know what functionality this will have.

At present you can also access your EndNote database through EndNote Web, an online version of the database that you can sync with your desktop files.

But there is also a 'hack' for being able to browse through and annotate the PDF files of articles etc. that you have attached to your EndNote database. Here's how it works (on Windows):

1) PDFs attached to items in an EndNote database are stored in subfolders of the folder containing the EndNote database. Take a look at this using Windows Explorer.

E.g., suppose you have a database Philosophy.enl in a folder called Biblio. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to your Biblio folder. Within it, you'll see a folder called Philosophy.data, and within that, a folder called PDF--and within that a bunch of subfolders with names based on the names of your attached PDF files. These folder contain your PDFs.

2) Download and install SugarSync, and set up a SugarSync account. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the PDF folder discussed above, e.g., Biblio\Philosophy.data\PDF, right click this folder, and select SugarSync>Share this Folder. Or, use the SugarSync manager to share this PDF folder. (Or use SugarSync to share a 'bigger' folder that contains the PDF folder.) When you do this, all the PDFs attached to your EndNote database will be synced to your SugarSync account on the web.

3) Install PDF Expert on your iPad. Set it up to use your SugarSync account. In the home screen, tap on Network, then on your SugarSync account, then navigate to the PDF folder above, and tap the Sync button in the top right corner. PDF Expert will now automatically download and sync the entire PDF folder structure above from SugarSync. This PDF folder can now be accessed from the Documents item at the top left of PDF Expert's home screen.

4) You can then use PDF Expert to open and annotate of the PDFs in the PDF folder. When you're done, tap on Sync at the bottom left of PDF Expert's home screen. The annotations that you've added and saved on your iPad will be pushed back to SugarSync, and then pulled down into your Windows computer. When you open up your attached PDFs in EndNote in Windows, you'll see your annotations. (To accelerate the step of syncing the iPad to SugarSync, you can select the Push changes option in PDF Expert.)

5) Alternately, in step 2, you could have PDF Expert synchronize just a particular folder containing a PDF that you want to study and annotate. That way, there are far fewer files to Sync.